Laszlo Krasznahorkai wins the literature Nobel.
[T]he Academy praised the author’s unique writing style, such as his long sentences and unbroken paragraphs that stretch for pages, which have led critics to compare him to Franz Kafka and Herman Melville.
I’m also reminded of Kleist, who got there before these other guys.
I’ve already said on this blog that there are certain sentences that only seem to show up in the New York Times, like this one, which features the phrase “only $100 million.”
One of New York’s vilest billionaires, Ronald Perelman, sued his insurance company because, far from paying him $410 million for fire damage to five artworks, they paid him NUTHIN cuz the paintings weren’t damaged and in any case (again see this post’s title) even if the insurers were in a mood to pay up, Perelman’s goodies were only worth the paltry sum of one hundred million (sniff).
So Perelman suffered not only a money diss, but today he lost his lawsuit because like everyone else – except some massively compensated expert witnesses – the judge can’t see a speck of damage.
The problem with this Artnews piece about differential pricing at the Louvre begins with its eye-popping headline:
France to Charge Non-Europeans $10 Tax to See the Mona Lisa
!!!
White skin?
Do come in.
*****************
Turns out they mean non-EU people pay more.
I am a big admirer of Hervé Guibert, as I explained in my essay “Sade in Jeans.” What I like about Guibert is that he was tough. It seems to me that in the English-speaking world the problem in AIDS writing has been sentimentality — a tearful, victimized, medicalized approach to AIDS and not enough defiance, anger, gutsiness. I don’t want to name names, but we’ve had everything from AIDS deathbed weddings to angels descending.
Of course this has been vastly admired by most people, and I feel like a cad not liking it. But I don’t like its sentimentality. It’s not that different from the death of Little Nell in Dickens. I think people living through AIDS probably get a lot of consolation from that kind of writing. But I think, as literature, it’s dubious.
New Kennedy Center, new repertoire.
There was a sequence where Eliza Douglas, Imhof’s former partner and frequent collaborator, removed her shirt, lay on the floor, and ran a black marker across her nude back. There was a part in which one performer, the talented actress Talia Ryder, intoned the Jeremih song “Paradise” live, and another in which she and another cast member sprawled out together on a dirtied mattress strewn with shattered iPhones. There were many moments in which Douglas and others vaped, puffing strawberry-scented mist into the audience…
Her performers are stony-faced misfits who somnambulantly drift around, occasionally enacting balletic choreographies along the way. The entire performance has the cooler-than-thou vibe of a Balenciaga runway show, replete with a range of rail-thin zillennials in baggy jeans; it has all the surface-level appeal of a Vogue slideshow devoted to one of those events, too…
Why does one performer receive a back tattoo—seemingly for real, with no makeup or special effects—on top of an SUV?…
It’s glib, dull, and hopeless, and it expresses itself well within its first half hour, during a scene where the cast shouts in unison: “We’re fucked, we’re doomed, we’re dead. I think I made you up inside my head.”
What started as an art show near Juan Tabo and Constitution quickly spiraled into a chaotic scene filled with gunshots and ended with a multi-vehicle car crash.
********************
This first sentence could be a template for future NM cultural events.
What started as a classroom discussion of Husserl’s influence on Merleau-Ponty quickly spiraled into a chaotic scene filled with gunshots and ended with scattered dismembered bodies.
What started as a performance of Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Swans” quickly spiraled into a chaotic scene filled with gunshots and ended with a pile of bloody tutus.
… Moonrise Kingdom, has died.
… during their visit yesterday to the Philadelphia Museum. With its dark lighting and massive interior columns, the building seemed to UD pretty oppressive.
And as for the Cassatt exhibit: The commentary kept telling us her mother/baby stuff is not not not sentimental.
Okay….
… UD‘s evil parents kept in their house for the moral undoing of their children the songs of Tom Lehrer.
From the age of nine onward, UD has been singing nonstop his greatest hits, so she’s intrigued by a new British play about him, Tom Lehrer Is Teaching Math and Doesn’t Want to Talk to You. The playwright pens a fine appreciation of Lehrer here, featuring Lehrer’s comment on his artistic output: “If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend, or perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worthwhile.”
Engraving: “That’ll teach her
to wear her hijab correctly next time.”
Beware the evil stepmother.
Prosecutors say the Wildenstein family pulled off “the longest and most sophisticated tax fraud” in the history of modern France in part [due] to their savvy use of storage: artworks were scattered across multiple countries, shell corporations, and innocuous holding facilities such as a nuclear bunker in the Catskill Mountains, a former fire station in New York, and sites in the Bahamas and the Channel Islands.
********************
Clever headline!
ART STASH SET FOR AN HEIR RAID
******************
… on all of whose surfaces appear the very greatest art the world has ever known.
*******************
La Kid and Mr UD gesticulate down the street from the museum.
UD felt self-congratulatory, getting to the end of this sentence in one piece.
